No-Land Magic: the Gathering

A Rules Variant

No-Land Magic: the Gathering is a rules variant that completely eliminates the concept of mana-screw. As the name implies, you don't use any lands in your deck. Instead, any card may be played upside-down (but still face-up) as a basic land capable of generating whatever color(s) that card is. For example, you can play an Elvish Warrior as a Forest or an Air Elemental as an Island. You can still only play one land per turn. (Multicolor cards behave like the Alpha dual lands, and Artifacts played as land are lands with no name that produce one colorless mana. Colored cards played as Basic Lands have the name of the appropriate Basic Land, and can be affected as if they were that card.)

The suggested minimum deck size is only 40 cards. This way, most constructed decks can be ported over with little effort beyond stripping out the lands.

Using No-Land rules, you never have too much or too little land. You do need to make some choices about which cards to commit as lands instead of casting normally. The biggest change is that once you have enough mana in play to handle your most expensive spells, you will never draw land again, and can then be more efficient. Given that the cards were designed for a somewhat different cost structure, this does somewhat favor weenie decks, as they can get by with only committing two or three cards as lands, yielding card advantage. On the other hand, decks that favor larger spells can now consistently get to their necessary mana base without missing a land drop, yielding a boost to tempo. And, rather obviously, cards with Landcycling abilities aren't very useful in this format...